


Bookworm

by bribitribbit



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-27
Updated: 2010-08-27
Packaged: 2017-10-11 06:46:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/109602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bribitribbit/pseuds/bribitribbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus can't explain the thing with Sirius any more than he can explain his love for reading.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bookworm

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to [](http://souliesoul.livejournal.com/profile)[**souliesoul**](http://souliesoul.livejournal.com/) for beta-ing and pointing out all my horrible tense flaws. ♥

  
Remus Lupin, in the course of his seventeen-years-and-nine-months-long life, has probably read more books than you.

Of course, it's difficult to know who exactly is reading this--you may even be one of those bookworms that have recently been discovered in the wilds of Africa (what bookworms were doing in _Africa_, researchers are still trying to find out; Remus has a few suspicions of his own and is even pondering on joining the research in three months' time when he's out of school)--but if you are the average English-speaking person that sometimes bothers to crack open a book, then yes, Remus Lupin has most likely read more than you have.

It isn't something he likes to flaunt, really. James Potter is one of the best Chasers in Gryffindor's recent history (in a world where, it must be considered, the average lifespan is about a hundred and twenty, and thus where the definition of "recent" may or may not lie entirely out of your mind's reach). Sirius Black is top of every class at Hogwarts without giving any of them much thought or studying time, not to mention the way he can get out of any kind of trouble with nary a scratch. Peter Pettigrew has an unfortunate, impressive ability to shove his entire fist into his mouth and still have room for his tongue. And Remus? Well, he reads.

It's more like he devours words, actually, at least according to Sirius.

"Now I know why you never eat," Sirius had rambled at him. "It's because your stomach's full of articles and pronouns and infinitives and syntax and synecdoche." Remus had considered, for the brief moment before he realized how entirely futile it would be, asking Sirius to define "synecdoche," just to make sure Sirius wasn't confusing it with some form of foreign biscuit.

However, before Remus could say anything, Sirius leaned too far back in his chair, and he'd fallen over laughing, and they'd been kicked out of the library.

Sometimes this does happen (and more often than usual, recently, because Sirius is somehow always around but Remus tries not to think about that). Sometimes Remus is annoyed by it; sometimes Remus watches Sirius laugh. The way he throws his head back and his black hair gets all over everywhere and his eyes get so squinty that Remus thinks Sirius's eyes will implode from the pressure.

Remus has witnessed many a laugh, and imagined them too (_Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees/Letting his arms down to laugh_), but Remus has never heard one so full of abandon and sincerity as Sirius's laugh, and never has any one laugh made Remus so happy.

Just yesterday, Sirius had been sitting next to him in the library again, laughing too hard at a picture of a man who had tried to Transfigure himself into a rabbit and had failed royally. But Remus didn't mind so much the librarian's frosty glare as she gripped both their elbows tightly, led them towards the heavy door that separates one world from the next, and bid them a short goodbye.

Sirius had grinned at him, and Remus grinned back and wondered if it would always be like this: Sirius tossing him secret smiles, and watching him studying and reading all the time, and both of them laughing together, and a silly little indefinable something that makes Remus feel like his skin is simultaneously too big and too small to hold the rest of him in.

Today, he's been lucky to escape James's and Peter's attempts at coercing him to go flying, and of course he's back at the library, sitting down in a little carrel he found a long time ago in a dark, quiet corner and avoiding the librarian's warning glare (though, all things considered, she's rather fond of Remus--much more so than of his friends, at any rate).

He has a new book now, a collection of Dickinson he's never read before, and it's likely nobody will be able to pull him out of this perfect little place for the next several hours at least.

He can't explain it at all. Maybe if you could live in his head for a day, and look through his eyes at the words gracefully rolling out on the pages, and live the characters' lives just for a little while, and understand sentences and the Deeper Meaning and Authorial Intent and, just, the catharsis of it all, maybe _then_ it could be arranged in some elucidating string of words. But as it is, nothing much can be compared to reading for Remus; and anyway, he feels that an explanation will somehow be like a tourniquet gripping everything that literature means to him, sucking out the magic and leaving behind dry words which, as much as Remus loves them, are nothing without some kind of anything holding them up.

He's walking out of the library later in the afternoon, his arms full of Dickinson and Forster and Arithmancy textbooks and a letter from his mother, when someone pulls him aside and into a dark closet he's never been inside before just off the library. The rods in his irises adjust to the dark (his hunger for words has led to occasional, desperate consumption of things even like _Gray's Anatomy_ and he is all too aware of the technical way he tends to think of and experience and live all the moments that aren't poetry) and he realizes it's Sirius. Sirius with his glitter-dark eyes and black hair, and pink lips that stretch over a nervous smile.

Remus doesn't know what to think about a nervous Sirius; on a scale, its worry-factor falls somewhere between a worldwide earthquake and Angry Duck Disease having contaminated last night's supper. He looks sidelong at the walls of the closet, lined with shelves and shelves of tattered books, without covers and without pages twenty-three to forty-nine.

"Moony," says Sirius.

"Sirius?" asks Remus.

And then Remus is being kissed. And, jump-started into action, he's kissing back. It is something entirely surprising and unlike any of the kisses he's ever imagined. He realizes, suddenly, why romance novels are so completely and unbelievably horrid--he has read a few, to his own chagrin--it's because this is all too perfect and at the same time all too imperfect to be written. It's like those romance novelists are hiding everything true about romance, which makes it all the more exciting and unexpected--especially to Remus, who has always believed everything you will ever need to know can be found somewhere in some book.

He's wrong. This is so rare (well, it _is_) that he doesn't know quite what to do.

Sirius pushes him up against one of the shelves. Remus reaches behind him and takes one of the books.

"Have you ever read this?" he asks desperately.

Sirius pulls away from his neck and looks at him curiously. "I bet you have," he says as a reply.

Remus glances at the title but the book is too old and the letters have been rubbed away. He looks up at Sirius, frowns, shakes his head. He slowly puts it back, and thinks that someone, somewhere in the world has probably read it, and that means that someone, somewhere has probably read more books than him. Sirius takes the book from him and looks like he's about to throw it--Remus winces--but he lays it down carefully on the bookshelf where it belongs and kisses Remus again.

~*~

Remus, in the course of his seventeen-years-and-ten-months-long life, has probably kissed Sirius more than you have.

~*~

End

  


_   
**Bookworm**   
_

The line "Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees/Letting his arms down to laugh" is from T.S. Eliot's "Sweeney Among the Nightingales." :)


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